Indonesia is a vast archipelago with a complex decentralization system. One negative implication is the dispersion of government data in various formats, standards, and definitions across ministries and regions. This condition makes it difficult to formulate targeted national programs, such as the distribution of social assistance (Bansos).
The Presidential Regulation on One Data Indonesia (SDI) was issued as a data governance framework to produce accurate, up-to-date, integrated, and accountable data. The main principles of SDI are: meeting data standards, using standardized metadata, data interoperability, and the use of master reference codes.
For example, writing administrative area addresses (village/district names) must refer to a single regional code issued by the Ministry of Home Affairs. If every agency uses its own writing format, computer systems will not be able to cross-match data between one agency and another.
The National Development Planning Agency (Bappenas) acts as the Coordinator of the central-level SDI Forum. The struggle to realize SDI is not just an IT task, but rather hard work in institutional negotiation. If this One Data foundation is successfully and strongly built, Indonesia's governance will leap far forward.
